Service Level Agreements Management Framework Research Articles

A Framework for Consumer-Centric SLA Management of Cloud-Hosted Databases

Service Level Agreements (SLA) represent the contract which captures the agreed upon guarantees between a service provider and its customers. The specifications of existing service level agreements (SLA) for cloud services are not designed to flexibly handle even relatively straightforward performance and technical requirements of consumer applications. In this article, we present a novel approach for SLA-based management of cloud-hosted databases from the consumer perspective. We present an end-to-end framework for consumer-centric SLA management of cloud-hosted databases. The framework facilitates adaptive and dynamic provisioning of the database tier of the software applications based on application-defined policies for satisfying their own SLA performance requirements, avoiding the cost of any SLA violation and controlling the monetary cost of the allocated computing resources. In this framework, the SLA of the consumer applications are declaratively defined in terms of goals which are subjected to a number of constraints that are specific to the application requirements. The framework continuously monitors the application-defined SLA and automatically triggers the execution of necessary corrective actions (scaling out/in the database tier) when required. The framework is database platform-agnostic, uses virtualization-based database replication mechanisms, and requires zero source code changes of the cloud-hosted software applications. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our SLA-based framework in providing the consumer applications with the required flexibility for achieving their SLA requirements.

AutoSLAM – A policy‐based framework for automated SLA establishment in cloud environments

SummaryCloud computing offers a realization of SOA in which IT resources are dynamically provisioned as services to consumers using flexible provisioning and pricing models. When provisioning such services, providers and consumers must first agree over the service usage terms and conditions, which are captured in Service Level Agreements (SLAs). In this paper, we propose a policy‐based framework with corresponding models, mechanisms and tools for the automated establishment of SLAs in open, diverse and dynamic cloud environments. The Automated SLA Management framework allows entities to specify their requirements and capabilities, and preferences over them in a flexible and expressive manner. It also supports multiple interaction models for SLA establishment, giving consumers and providers the flexibility to select the one that is most appropriate in a given context, while simultaneously participating in multiple concurrent SLA interactions using different interaction models. As part of the framework, we define a formal model for the underlying policies, a corresponding physical model WS‐SLAM that extends WS‐Policy and a reference architecture that can be easily implemented. We validate the practicability of our framework through the Smart CloudPurchaser prototype that can automatically purchase computing resources from Amazon EC2 under different scenarios and contexts. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A framework for SLA management in cloud computing for informed decision making

In cloud computing, service providers offer cost-effective and on-demand IT services to service users on the basis of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). However the effective management of SLAs in cl...

SLA-BASED JOB SUBMISSION AND SCHEDULING WITH THE GLOBUS TOOLKIT 4

High performance computing is nowadays mostly performed in a best effort fashion. This is surprising as the closely related topic of grid computing, which deals with the federation of resources from multiple domains in order to support large jobs, and cloud computing, which promises seemingly infinite amounts of compute and storage, both offer quality of service (QoS), albeit in different ways. Long-term service level agreements (SLAs), which require the establishment of SLAs long in advance of their actual usage, seem a promising way for the offering of QoS guarantees in an HPC environment in a way that is not disruptive to the business models employed today. This work uses the long-term SLA approach as a basis for the provisioning of service levels for HPC resources and presents an SLA management framework to support this. Flexibility is provided by providing SLAs with different service levels, support for which is integrated into job submission and scheduling. The SLA management framework can, on a high level, be used in a generic fashion and an implementation is presented that is evaluated against a motivating scenario.